When 55 degree torrential downpours followed a subzero weekend, pipes burst and flooded Papercut Zine Library, soaking and damaging boxes containing several hundred to a thousand zines, many decades-old and irreplaceable. After consulting the New England Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), Papercut librarians quickly moved the soggy zines into the pizza freezer at the landlord’s restaurant across the street. The NEDCC told us the only way to save the zines is to get them professionally vacuum freeze dried, which, between boxing and shipping and treatment at the facility in Pennsylvania, carries a ~$2,000 price tag.

Yesterday we set up this fundraiser and thanks to a swift and enormous outpouring of support, from which we are still reeling, the vacuum freeze drying professionals picked up the ten carefully packed boxes of zines TODAY! They’re heading to the facility in Allentown, PA this week! Our fundraising goal also reflects a year of rent, as we have been running low on rent money lately and haven’t even set up internet in the location we’ve been at for nearly a year. With your help, this shan’t be the case for long!

Bye for now, zines! Come back dry and room temperature so we can read and love you again!

State of the Papercut Address
An Open Community Meeting to Discuss Papercut’s Future
Wednesday July 23, 7PM
Lorem Ipsum, 1299 Cambridge Street, Cambridge 02139
Snacks.

Papercut is on the move again and we invite you to brainstorm our next steps with us. After all, we collect and make these zines available for YOU! We bring the snacks, you bring your zine-love, your ideas, your resources, and your idea-ful and resourceful friends! Hear more about the situation and our temporary space (launching ~August 1st) and tell us things you want us to know. Maybe it’s about how we’re doing, what you want to see in our future location, who you think we should work with or talk to, and where you want to see us go, whether that’s literal or figurative! Let’s do this!

Botched SEX change. Sketchy DRUGS. ROCKer stripper crime family. ROLLed ice cream truck.
I’ve Got a Time Bomb reads as a novelized memoir, with all names and places so badly mangled as to be inadmissable in court, and past the statute of limitations anyway.

Visual artist and zinester Sybil Lamb is coming to town with zinester and stand up comedian Red Durkin, and Cambridge will never be the same again. Joining them is local writer and performer Adrienne Price, who will be reading from a memoir she wrote in the mental hospital.

Related: some locals, inspired by Red Durkin’s example, are organizing a Boston Area Trans Ladies Picnic for Sunday June 22nd at 2PM in Franklin Park. While you must be a trans lady to attend, you needn’t be a trans lady to promote it!

If you can’t make it to the event, you can order Sybil Lamb’s book here!

Sybil Lamb does not have a time bomb. She gave it to a girl she liked.

Among the many delightful aspects of our growing (!) librarian staff collective is the specialized skills and knowledge we each bring with us! We’ve got a comic geek expert, a master of divinity, we’ve got punx, anarchists, feminists who can take you through the music zines, perzines, animal and environmental zines, give you gardening tips, tempt you with vegan baking recipes, enlighten you on zine culture in the Middle East, tell you where to find a D&D game, regale you with stories of repeatedly running into John Waters in P-Town, or share fun facts about Imperial Russian ballet. We keep promising each other a Report Night at one of our weekly Monday meetings, and then thought we should let our patrons in on the fun!

The fun starts Monday May 19th at 7PM! Come on in to hear An Astonishingly Brief History of (independent) Print Culture. By Adrienne. She went to College. For History. She aspires to contextualize zines in the broader history of people writing stuff down and why.

We intend to host talks on the third Mondays of the month at 7PM. Future topics may include comic talk, feminism and zines, baking zines, and who even knows what else? We’ll keep you posted, though!

If you’re missing our table at the NYC Feminist Zine Fest at Barnard College in Manhattan this Saturday, March 1st, you can still catch our interview on their site! They asked which kitchen appliance we most resemble. Find out why we are a pressure canner.

We told you we’re doing a series of zine workshops for teens and tweens around town this summer. It has begun!

We adore tending to our circulating collection of zines in Inman Square in Cambridge, but we exult in these invitations to bring zine love outside the confines of our walls! It warms our analog hearts to introduce workshop participants to another medium for exploring their voices and expressing their creativity, and to marvel at their own innovations within the zine format. Meanwhile it titillates our intellects to nerd out on (zine) librarianship with BPL’s skilled and personable staff members– also 80s/90s pop culture ^_^

Lower Mills, with children’s librarian Angela Bonds:
A few participants were inspired to gut some old books and commandeer the covers for their own works, filling the bindings with contents spanning fashion, hatred, and why your pet rat is not cool.

In these kooky digital days, some have wondered whether zines are still relevant. The New York Times and the thriving existence of zine libraries like Papercut would indicate that YES! Zines are a living medium! In our seven years we have signed up ~1500 members and accumulated ~15,000 zines, placing us among the largest zine collections in the world! Aren’t you lucky to live near us?

Yes. So take advantage of your proximity and come on over to 1299 Cambridge Street 02139 on May 19th for food, fun, music, and NEW ZINES!
We invite zinesters to bring their new zines to sell/distribute. Contact papercut at riseup dot net if you want to add your zine to the party.

Zine list thus far:High 5! The funnest and finest bi-weekly listing of free and cheap events available.Bay State Badass #2! Brand new second issue of the lady-centric bike zine taking the streets by storm.Today Belongs to You by Andrue CoombesNothing Mattress by Brian ConnollyNew Vision by the Chubby Behemoth
Assorted Comic Zines by Liz Prince
Assorted Zines by Chelsea DirckMiss Sequential’s SketchbookTodo Sobre Mi MadreRihanna by Coorain Devin. About Rihanna and how her image functions in our culture.

There will be live music and snackies. Come and bring friends and zines!
Leave with new zines and maybe new friends ^_^

The queer zine mini-exhibit is down, and the weather is being freaking weird, but it is definitely gardening time and one of our newer librarians has set up a mini-exhibit featuring some of our gardening zines!
Don’t forget that Papercut is not only a fantastic resource for your gardening needs, we are now open on Fridays again! So drop on by Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays from 2-7!

Did you know that one of your friendly Papercut librarians is an archivist in training? She was invited to talk at New England Archivists’ DIY-themed conference in Connecticut yesterday on a panel about Building Community Archives with Volunteers. For indeed, Papercut has always been a volunteer endeavor, and in May we will mark our seventh anniversary as such. At a packed session, also featuring representatives from Boston’s Occupy Library and Keene State’s Modern Poetry Archive, this Papercutie introduced a room bursting with archives professionals to the way we do things at Papercut, bringing along and circulating through the room for perusal over a dozen zines in the event that attendees had never encountered any (the zines that took the longest to come back: DIY Berlin: Be Your Own Damn Tour Guide, feminist bike zine Bay State Badass, There Has Been No Cover Up, exposing and fighting rape culture at Cornell University, and the Relationship Playbook from Pittsburgh). Attendees loved the zines and were fascinated and enraptured by the presentation.

Meanwhile, elsewhere at the conference, this Papercutie picked up a bottle of deacidification spray from the Preservation Technologies table, an operation run outside Pittsburgh. Most of the zines in our 14,000-item strong collection, while delightful, were generally not made for endurance. Though the cheapness of zines is generally listed among the virtues of the medium, the materials upon which most were made mean that as years and decades go by, the acid content of the paper will eventually cause the materials to devour themselves. No materials in our collections evince this more clearly than our newsprint items, plenty of which date back to the 1970s, and some from earlier. Before the bottle of deacidification spray ran out, our heroine managed to coat four copies of HOMOCORE (queer punks) from the late 80s and early 90s, as well as two anarchist-feminist publications from 1978, one produced in London and the other in JP.

True story.

So come on by! We’re here Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays 2-7 and if you ask very nicely and promise to be careful, you can examine the old things we keep hidden.

Our zines are currently living in a new space at 10 Ward St. in Somerville.

We will be open Sundays from 2pm to 7pm or, as always, we are happy to open by appointment. Email, call, or text us for the address and directions.

You can also contact us to set up an event, book us for a workshop, or have us curate a pop-up library at your event or classroom!

Since we've moved to a new space, zines are back in circulation! If you have any of our zines that you forgot to return, please bring them home (and take out some new ones!).

About Us

Papercut is a fully-functioning lending library, with a focus on hand-made and independently produced materials. Our collection includes everything from the all-familiar photocopied punk rock zines from the 80's to hand-crafted personal zines bound together with yarn.

Papercut is run by a collective of volunteer librarians. In addition to archiving and maintaining this collection, librarians also host a number of events including zine making workshops and zine release parties.

Become a member today to join this growing community of zine enthusiasts!